Life Lessons of the Periodic Table
by Levi Andrew Noe



Bryan and I should have decided much earlier on that it was in our best interest and in the interest of the preservation of the world at large to not hang out. Some elements, when combined with other elements just have a way of exploding or corroding or poisoning or causing lesions. It’s the way of nature. Hydrogen, for example, is essential to so many necessities of life, but it’s highly flammable, and when combined with sulfur and oxygen it makes sulfuric acid.

But other elements are just plain nasty alone or merged, like fluorine, mercury, arsenic. I don’t know whether Bryan and I were like the more harmless, inert elements and we just created the wrong kind of reaction, or if we were the toxic elements and we just multiplied our deadly effects. At that time of our lives, in our unstable, highly reactive teens, I would lean toward the latter of the two.

The first strike was a pocketknife to the throat. It was a direct hit, small, pointy end first, but it barely left a scratch on my throat. It wasn’t Bryan that flicked the knife, but he was in the room and I think our rudiments had already started intermingling. Landon had dealt the near fatal wrist flick as he was trying to open a small knife “like they do in the movies”. But Landon and I were just like any other two ignorant, self-destructive elements on the periodic table, licentious but not lethal. Though he had been the one who first introduced me to the lady Mary Jane, and he was in the passenger seat when I broke the axle of my Pontiac Grand Am doing donuts on our lunch break, I don’t think it was his noxious nuances guiding the knife.

The second strike came later on, the same day as the misfired pocketknife. Landon, Bryan and I had a jovial afternoon of violence shooting each other with small balls full of paint, propelled at vicious, stinging speeds. Bryan had a house in a then undeveloped area where there was plenty of open prairie, small ravines and boulders to have a great time playing war games.

The game was done. We wore our welts and bruises with pride. Protective masks were off and we were all ready to call it a day. But not before I got one last shot in. I was walking toward Landon and Bryan from my side of a small growth of trees. I was perhaps a hundred yards away, a very long distance, a distance that most paintballers would not expect to hit even a large target, let alone a bull’s-eye.

I lifted up my gun in jest. I called Bryan’s name from afar. He looked up and I took careless aim and fired. The paintball was not meant to come anywhere near Bryan’s person, perhaps within a few feet at best. Just a final, wisecracking shot we could laugh about later when we recounted all the great plays of the game. But it hit its target. It was so accurate in fact that Billy the Kid would have likened it to shooting a fly right between its wings. Bryan went down.

My little joke, our amusing day, my stomach all went sinking down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench as well. I ran over to Bryan with a feeling of abysmal dread. He was holding his face and groaning in distress. Lance was crouched down next to him asking if he was all right, but getting no response through the moaning and doom in the air. Our parents would never let us play with paintball guns again.

We got Bryan to a hose and helped him wash out his eye. I couldn’t tell if it was blood or paint in his eye. We rinsed it off, it was blood. Bryan’s eye had become a bulging, scarlet orb, a horrific contusion. He couldn’t see through it at all. I almost threw up, thinking that I had blinded him. We took him inside and after he was in somewhat stable condition we confirmed the lie that we would tell his mother. I left in shame and shambles. I couldn’t even take pride in the shot of a lifetime. Bryan’s sight returned later on that same day, but he still has little to no depth perception and probably won’t for life, all from one wicked shot that should never have made its mark.

Bryan and I didn’t consciously choose to not hang out after that, but I think we both understood there was something dangerous about our alliance. We steered clear of close, prolonged contact for a while after that. But a year or so later, after the optical wound had healed, we decided to go up for a day to snowboard. The day went great. No one came to any near death conclusions during our high speed game of tag in the trees. Neither of us broke anything as we risked life and limb jumping 10, 20 high off jumps in the terrain park. Even the rails proved bloodless.

It was on our way back that the third strike struck. Bryan was driving his small Honda Civic. It had snowed earlier in the day, but the sun was shining on our triumphant return home. There was a bit of slush and snow on I-70, but it was nothing we hadn’t driven on a thousand times in Colorado. Bryan was passing people in the left lane at 70 or 75 m.p.h. All of a sudden the car started to turn. I assumed Bryan was just changing lanes. But then the car started to turn more. I looked over at Bryan and his mouth was open in a soundless “Oh shit!” I knew something was wrong. We continued to turn and turn until we were rotated 180 degrees.

We screamed and wailed in unison. The traffic was now coming directly for us like the bulls of Pamplona. Except these bulls were made of metal, filled with combustible liquids and traveling between 60 and 75 m.p.h. We had no time to say our prayers or recount the deeds of our life, both righteous and wicked. There was only time to scream and spin and hope for a quick end.

But the car continued its trajectory and rotated a full 360 degrees. We came crashing into a snow bank on the shoulder and stopped dead in our frictionless tracks. The car stalled, we stepped out like hostages from a plane expecting to have to be towed home. But there was not a mark on the car that we could see. When we got back in after jumping and shouting and praising the names of our numberless gods and guardian angels, the car started with only a hesitant whine. We drove home a bit slower, with a little more reverence for life. We never spent time together one on one again.

​I imagine that each of us has a thin thread of life that the Fates hold in their hands and fray or singe or gnaw on continuously until they snap. I don’t know what my thread is made of, or Bryan’s; it’s either some thin, but indestructible metal like Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton or its some rare unearthly silly putty with properties like flubber. Whatever it is that we are composed of, life and near-death showed us that some elements should not be combined.